WIDDRINGTON, William (1678-1743)

The 4th Baron Widdrington joined his father in his commitment to Roman Catholicism and to the Jacobite cause. Much of this biography is based on the information in L. Gooch, The Desperate Faction? The Jacobites of North-east England. He and his two younger brothers, Charles and Peregrine, fled with their father to the exiled court at St Germain shortly after the Revolution. As a young man he met many English peers and members of the gentry as they passed through Catholic Europe, and his early carousing with James Stanhope^†, later Earl Stanhope, in Brussels in November 1697 may have benefited him later when he was under sentence of death. HMC Cowper, ii. 370. He was back in England by 1700, when he married Jane Tempest, a member of a family noted for its Catholicism and Jacobitism. By this marriage he also acquired the valuable coal-rich manor of Stella, with its accompanying manor house, in Durham. He made Stella Hall his home, his family’s ancestral residence of Widdrington Castle having been ruinously sacked in a French raid in 1691. He enjoyed a rent roll of £4,000 p.a. from his lands and coal-mining interests, through which he was able to indulge a passion for field sports and to develop a reputation for generous hospitality among Catholic, Jacobite and Tory circles in the north-east. His continuing refusal to abjure his Catholic faith by taking the required oaths meant that he never sat in the House, but on 25 May 1711 he did petition his peers, albeit unsuccessfully, against a bill ‘for the further encouragement of the coal trade’, which he claimed would prejudice his economic interests in Stella.

Widdrington’s wife died on 9 Sept. 1714, leaving behind three sons and five daughters, but he maintained both his residence and interest in Stella and his commitment to the Catholic Jacobite cause. He raised a troop of Northumbrian Jacobites and mustered them near Alnwick on 6 Oct. 1715 with a view to joining the Scottish Jacobites making their way south. NLS, ms 7044, f. 2r. He was not given a military command, having had no military experience, and Robert Patten later condemned his lack of vigour in the struggle, ‘unless it consisted in his early persuasions to surrender’. R. Patten, The History of the late Rebellion (1717), 125. Widdrington was confined to his bed by gout during the engagement at Preston on 14 Nov. 1715, and was foremost in persuading Thomas Forster and other Jacobite leaders to surrender to the numerically superior royal troops. Brought to London and imprisoned in the Tower, he and his noble accomplices (one English and five Scottish lords) were impeached for high treason before the House by the Commons on 9 Jan. 1716. In his answer to the charges, submitted on 19 Jan., Widdrington tried to mitigate his sentence by arguing that he was the first to propose a surrender and a bloodless resolution to the conflict. The Jacobite peers pleaded guilty at their trial in Westminster Hall on 9 Feb. and were condemned to death. State Trials, xv. 770–802. Only a few hours before their planned execution on 24 Feb. Widdrington was reprieved, no doubt assisted by a delegation from the House which had petitioned the king earlier that day to show mercy to the condemned peers. Widdrington himself appears to have turned to William Wake, archbishop of Canterbury, and later thanked him fulsomely for his ‘most obliging and charitable interecession’ with the king for his mercy. Christ Church, Oxf. Wake mss 19, ff. 243–4, 249, 250, 251. John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, may also have played a role in procuring the reprieve, as Widdrington also felt the need to thank him and to solicit his continuing favour. Add. 61136, f. 190. Widdrington continued to have his punishment delayed until, on 22 Nov. 1717, the House released him from imprisonment and the capital sentence under the terms of the Act of General and Free Pardon.

Widdrington’s real estate was seized by the Forfeited Estates Commission in April 1716 and sold over the following years, to the value of ‘£100,000 and upwards’ by February 1733. TNA, FEC 1/1624, 1636. In Durham, he found a protector in his old schoolmate from Morpeth grammar school Charles Howard, 3rd earl of Carlisle, who was also a kinsman of Widdrington’s second wife, Catherine, the daughter of the Jacobite Richard Graham^‡, Viscount Preston [S]. Carlisle had been made a trustee for Widdrington’s children only a few months before the ’Fifteen and after Widdrington’s attainder he was diligent in keeping intact the Stella estates, which had been forfeited for the term of Widdrington’s life only and were to go to his heirs at his death. Gooch, Desperate Faction, 114–23; TNA, SP 35/7/12.

On 27 Feb. 1719 Widdrington, with his five surviving children, unsuccessfully petitioned the Commons, requesting that £700 from the annual revenue of £800 from the estates in Stella be directed to the relief of his children. Add. 61632, ff. 148–9. He was more successful in 1723, when a supply bill was passed on 27 May, a clause of which provided that £12,000 of the money raised by the sale of Widdrington’s property was to be paid to him for his and his family’s maintenance. Add. 39922, f. 44. Ten years later a bill was passed to relieve him of some of the disabilities he suffered under when engaging in legal actions concerning real property, supported by Carlisle’s son Henry Howard* [632], styled Viscount Morpeth (later 4th earl of Carlisle). HMC Egmont Diary, i. 337–8; CJ, xxii. 62–63, 99, 154.

Widdrington died intestate at Bath in 1743. Although his eldest son, Henry Francis, continued to style himself ‘Lord Widdrington’, the claim was not recognized and the peerage never restored.